Comment by alsetmusic

The older I get, the more I realize what matters to me as well. I worked a FAANG with a long commute. I then worked a job with a short drive (10m morning, 15m afternoon, both via Uber when it was cheap). I now have a 12m walk to and from. The last one is purely luck, as I didn't know it'd be so close when I applied. (None of this omits the importance of working with honest people who have shared values.)

I am focused on the first part of the original line, however:

> pick the work you’re built for, then aim to be the best at it.

When I was ~20 years old, I thought I should avoid working in a job based on computers. I didn't want my hobby / passion to become my work and ruin it. It took several years to realize that I should obviously be in the space because I was good at it. It still took many years to figure out and understand what fine-grained details about the work must exist to do so successfully. I had some misery before finding what I love.

It's easy to have wisdom after experiencing life for a long time. I'm not knocking wisdom or older people who have it (it's hard fought to win it). I'm just lamenting that it's very hard to know these things before you have experience. What I thought would be my dream job was the one I hated the most.

You gotta do it for a while before you can truly understand what and why you love and hate different aspects of a role. Then you extrapolate after multiple variations before you can really apply the knowledge holistically.

I genuinely feel bad for people who get into the space because money. When I joined, it was still all passionate nerds who were excited about what we were doing. Now it feels like the space is full of people who had to pick from "lawyer, doctor, coder," without really wanting to do any of them. I'm one of the luckiest people in the world since I actually wanted to do this and it turned out to be a good career. What a shame for them.